About Nathalie B.
The Day The Meadow Spoke...
I was eight the first time the bees found me.
One spring afternoon in my mother’s garden in the South of France, I wandered off the most traveled path (which, as it turns out, would become a recurring theme in my life). I had gotten drawn by a soft hum coming from a patch of lavender. As I got closer, I realized the air itself seemed to shimmer with movement. Honey bees were drifting from flower to flower, their golden bodies catching the sunlight like tiny living sparks, and it looked magical to eight year old me.
I stood very still, not afraid, just completely fascinated. One of them gently settled on my hand. For the next couple of minutes, the world seemed to pause as I stared at her tiny body pulsating while she brushed herself and rested. All I could feel was the faint vibration of that little bee against my skin. It was such a simple moment, but it captured something profound: the quiet feeling of life at work, and my connection to it. I remember standing there in absolute awe, completely mesmerized. I was so grateful!
At the time, I had no idea that moment would eventually shape the course of my life. I only knew that it felt extraordinary. Then, that spring, still thinking about it, I spent hours in the library writing a school report about the dance language of bees. I filled pages with little sketches of figure eights and flowers, fascinated by the idea that bees could communicate so much just through movement. Instead of satisfying my curiosity, that project only deepened it, and I was hooked. From then on, every garden buzz and every hum in a field pulled me a little closer into their world.
Three decades later, in the spring of my fortieth year, I finally brought home my first very own colony. What began as a single hive instantly rekindled that same childhood wonder and quickly grew into an all-consuming passion. I am grateful the bees have been keeping me ever since!
Today, that childhood spark has grown into Bee Mindful: more than 400 thriving colonies, two diverse teaching apiaries, and a life devoted to helping others discover the beauty, intelligence, and resilience of bees. And I get to live my passion in the process!
BIO
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Nathalie B. is an internationally recognized speaker and advocate for Treatment-Free, sustainable beekeeping, best known for promoting Horizontal Top-Bar Hives as a simple, affordable, accessible, and easy-to-manage option for backyard beekeepers.
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She optimized and redesigned existing plans to create a global standard for Top-Bar Hive designs, allowing cross-country interchangeability of hives and comb for suppliers and customers.
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She invented the Flex Hive, an internationally acclaimed Langstroth-to-Top-Bar adapter, which she was invited to present on at Apimondia 2025 in Copenhagen.
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A regular speaker at regional and national events, she was recently invited as a keynote speaker for the Natural Beekeeping Summit and a three-week speaking tour in Australia.
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In 2019, she was invited by the Congolese government to design and lead the country's training programs for the national trade schools, and spent almost a year setting up teaching apiaries, writing training manuals in French, and setting up training for new beekeepers.
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Passionate about community outreach, Nathalie has developed training programs and teaching apiaries for refugees in Congo, Nigeria, and Texas, and launched multiple Youth Scholarship Programs, donating dozens of horizontal hives in the process.
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An Ohio State MBA graduate and one of only 5 Master Craftsman Beekeepers in Texas, with 15 years of experience managing all hive styles and nearly 400 colonies, she is the Owner of Bee Mindful, a full-service beekeeping business offering free plans, comprehensive apprenticeships, workshops in Natural beekeeping, AG exemption services, affordable, practical horizontal hives and Treatment-Free bees.
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She also serves or has served as President, Vice President, Chairman of the Board, and Director in multiple Texas state-level beekeeper associations, is a Level 3 Honey Sommelier candidate, and is currently serving a 3 year term as a Board Member of the American Apitherapy Society.
Did you know that May 20th is World Bee Day?
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Trivia 1: Charles Dadant, a famous French-American beekeeper, the inventor of the Dadant beehive, and one of the founding fathers of modern beekeeping, was born on May 20th.
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Triva 2: That day is also the celebrated birthdate of Anton Janša from Slovenia, the first teacher of modern beekeeping, and the reason we now celebrate World Bee Day on May 20th: he was so talented that Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa appointed him headmaster at the world’s first beekeeping school.
How serendipitous then that, as a teacher of beekeeping classes, Nathalie's own birthday is also May 20th, World Bee Day, after the first teacher of modern beekeeping?